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Week in Review: Saints, Books, and Lots of Prayer.

Week in Review: Saints, Books, and Lots of Prayer.

Last updated on: September 26, 2025 at 5:14 pm by Billy Kangas

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Week in Review: Saints, Books, and Lots of Prayer. 2025-09-26T17:14:13-04:00 Billy Kangas

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Honoring St. Vincent de Paul

As we prepare for the weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about St. Vincent de Paul. I wrote a new entry in my series on him, whose feast day we celebrate tomorrow, on my Substack. You can visit it here.

I was particularly struck by how he transformed the wounded places in his life into opportunities for healing in the world. That kind of spiritual resilience is tremendously powerful.

Book Reflection: Life Worth Living

This week, I read Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, and Matthew Croasmun. It’s a thoughtful synthesis of human wisdom across traditions, exploring how we make meaning and prioritize values.

It came out a couple of years ago, and I have to say, it was a book worth living, worth reading. It does a great job of synthesizing much of the thought that exists in the heritage of our human existence on this planet as it wrestles with questions of making meaning out of life and finding what they call a recipe that brings together values and priorities in a way that’s cohesive and, dare I say, delicious. All of them come from the background of Christian theology, but they don’t limit the book to simply Christian perspectives. All in all, I found much of what was shared to be of value, and I plan on returning to it again and taking a bit more time with some of the questions that they ask at the end of each chapter, which I think is a wonderful practice to get into.

New Prayer Practice on Twitter

Inspired by the book and recent encouragement, I’ve transformed my Orant Twitter feed into a daily log of my prayer times. You can follow along at
@learningtopray.

I’m aiming to pray all seven hours of the Liturgy of the Hours daily, along with attending or reviewing the Mass readings.

I’ll admit I am rarely 100% consistent in this, but I wanted a place where I could reflect briefly on how God is illuminating my own heart and faith in the midst of praying these prayers of the church. So this new practice has been so helpful to me. I don’t imagine there’s much of an audience for a collection of brief prayer reflections, but if you’re interested in following the project, I’m hoping to continue doing it for some time until it ceases to be of value to my spiritual life. So feel free to tune in, and I would be very encouraged if readers contributed their own reflections on the prayers of the Church for each of the hours or for the Mass readings as they go about their daily lives.

If you’re interested, I’d love for readers to share their own reflections on the prayers of the Church or the daily Mass readings.

Reading: A Layman’s Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours

Continuing my journey through guidebooks on the Liturgy of the Hours, I recently read A Layman’s Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours by Fr. Timothy Gallagher. It’s a concise and accessible overview, especially helpful for beginners. I am a huge Liturgy of the Hours fan, and it forms the central practice of my own spiritual life, and as a result, tend to read a lot of these books. This one’s been on my list of books to read for some time now, and I was glad to finally get around to reading what was in this edition. I’ve read Timothy’s memoir of sorts on the Liturgy of the Hours in the past. This book draws from many of those lessons, but I found it to be a really nice little overview, particularly helpful for beginners in this process.

Upcoming Series: Roadside Rosaries

I wanted to highlight an upcoming project that I had the great pleasure of being a part of early this week, which was a new series I’m producing called Roadside Rosaries, in which I host conversations about the rosary and its impact in someone’s life as we gather pairs of people to discuss a mystery of the rosary and pray a decade together. This week I was able to travel down to St. Anne’s Chapel down in Lawton, Michigan. It’s a remarkable little chapel that was built in Poland, shipped across the ocean, and reconstructed in Lawton, Michigan.

It was originally built in Poland and reconstructed here. It’s part of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius community, which first introduced me to the Roman Latin Mass tradition – a few years before I even became Catholic.

I was honored to record with Reverend Joshua Caswell and Kevin Matthews, a former radio legend whose life was transformed by Mary. We spent the day praying and reflecting on the mysteries of the rosary. It was a wonderful day.

Stay tuned for the Roadside Rosaries series and keep an eye out for the upcoming film Broken Mary: The Kevin Matthews Story, releasing in theaters on October 7, 2025.

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